Changing rooms

Metamorphosis, Lyric Hammersmith *****

The play examines that age-old question: what do you do if your son turns into a giant beetle?

The staging of Kafka’s story about transformation, disassociation and exclusion, is beautifully simple.

First of all, the set is very impressive. The two tier set has a sitting room on the lower level, with a bedroom above it, turned on its side. When Gregor (Björn Thors) wakes up one morning and finds himself transformed into a hideous monster (thankfully represented figuratively rather than literally), he scuttles around the walls, climbing up scores of handholds in the ceiling and walls.

The set alone and his incredibly gymnastics around it are spellbinding. The fact is relatively bare but the production is visually stunning, a great reminder that you don’t need huge amounts of cash poured into a staging to make it effective.

Björn Thors as Gregor in Metamorphosis

But the tone of the production is also spot on. It opens with a fabulous score with the mother, father and daughter drinking their morning tea, in a highly choreographed representation of oppressive domestic routine. Throughout the production, the choreography is over-emphasised but perfect, so everything is an exaggerated version of the truth.

Gregor is a dutiful son, uncomplainingly providing the only family income.  When he changes, his family can only see a slavering monster and hear a horrific noise. The daughter initially tries to help him but even she becomes increasingly cruel when she falls for the Lodger, who provides another great performance. The family see him as an impediment to their social status and general happiness. The fact that he remains committed to their happiness, still desperately wanting his sister to realise her dream to study the violin at an academy, is heartbreaking.

It’s funny but moving and intensely sad and uncomfortable; definitely one of the best things I’ve seen for a while.

Randomly brilliant

Random, Royal Court
****

Random is just fifty minutes long. But who needs more time when you can fit this much in?

The performance alone by Nadine Marshall is unbelievably good, deserving of some Best Actress nominations.

As she stands alone on the Jerwood Theatre stage, in semi darkness, all eyes are on her. Marshall holds the attention and imagination for the entire piece, bringing to life playwright’s Debbie Tucker Green’s four key characters – a mother, father, daughter and son – and an array of peripheral characters.

Each is created with clarity and perfect intonation, the personalities all distinct. The mother is steeped in Carribean tradition, dad is a man of few words, the sister is bright, funny, unfulfilled by her boring job with her colleagues “chatting their shit”, and the son is a teenager, skirting around the edges of getting into trouble. It is easy to become completely engrossed and convinced by the dialogue between them.

The series of beautifully observed relationships transform dramatically into a tragedy, when the son is killed in a gang attack.

And this is what lets the play down. Although the tragic climax is powerful, it occurs too early and Marshall has to maintain the grief and pain for too long. The authentic detailed observations of the characters are replaced with wider brushstrokes, descriptions of mourning around the scene of the crime, the policemen breaking the news, viewing the dead body. There is a danger of reaching saturation point with tragedy, where the audience becomes overwhelmed rather than empathetic.

Most of all, the death is narrated only by the sister and I missed the lightness and technical brilliance of the first half, where Marshall switched between characters.

Random is funny, lyrical, moving and dominated by a startlingly good performance by Marshall. But if the tragic climax had come just a bit later, and Tucker Green had reintroduced some of the deftness from the first scenes, the play would have gone from brilliant into unmissable.